November 02, 2008

Jeffrey Rowland

Jeffrey Rowland is the author of two long-running webcomics, the satyrical (and anarchic) Overcompensating, and the charming (and anarchic) Wigu.

Overcompensating falls into the realm of "journal comics". Ostensibly, a journal comic should be about the author's own life, but absolutely never is. There may be similarities - Jeffrey has written arcs about his necrotic spider-bite, the day he was certain he was going to die, hiring new staff at his company and similar mundane things. But as we all know not that much stuff happens in real life - certainly not enough for a daily update. So fiction is the order of the day. Jeffrey treats modern American culture and politics like a hypochondriac having a panic attack -

And deals with the harsh realities of modern life like a man staying afloat above a nervous breakdown, using his WACOM tablet as a raft. The results are brutally honest, absolutely absurd, and tremendously funny.

Wigu on the other hand is the tale of a little boy's adventures in the world. It's not quite the same world that Overcompensating occurs in - the scope of the adventure is simultaneously contracted - Wigu deals with events in "real-time", so by and large a comic covers about the amount of time it takes you to read it - and expanded - the Tinkle family, the stars of the comic, have travelled to the ruins of Atlantis and the surface of Mars during their adventures.

Wigu's main protagonist is the titular Wigu, an 8 year old boy living with his alcoholic mother, gothic sister and porn-theme-composer father. The family disfunctions in a caring way - so far so Simpsons. The joy of the comic comes from the family's exposure to the insane realities (and fantasies) of human existence. Wigu sees the same awful world that Rowland presents in Overcompensating, but he sees it with the eyes of a child. Not to say that everything is consequently a question of innocence lost - Wigu is a fairly astute potrayal of an eight year old child, from diction through to television obsession, and he's too much of a character to be completely perfect.

Wigu and Overcompensating are different attempts to deal with the unpleasant realities of a lot of human life - the awfulness of the internet, the idiocy of politics, the idiocy of people. Overcompensating gives an exaggerated picture of human life in dissaray - Wigu filters the madness so that the world is the kind of awful place children imagine their adventures coming from. Both are superb.

(A note to the wise - jjrowland.com links to several places, amongst them Overcompensating, the Wigu archives, and the currently updating Wigu series.)